The Text of Handel´s Messiah: A Time Capsule of Early-Modern Textual Criticism

Marybeth Hauffe

doi:10.5771/9783374076215

Summary

Is Handel’s Messiah anti-Judaistic? The question has been coursing through the academic world for some time now. This book shows the oratorio’s text to be more often than not in agreement with traditional Jewish translation and commentary. Moreover, its divergences from ascribed King-James-Version and Book-of-Common-Prayer texts, in preference for those sourced by the Codex Alexandrinus and Peshitta, evidence not only librettist Charles Jennens’ philological prowess, but also the oratorio itself as example of eighteenth-century English scholarship at its very best.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2025
ISBN-Print: 978-3-374-07620-8
ISBN-Online: 978-3-374-07621-5
Publisher: EVA, Leipzig
Language: English
Pages: 258
Product type: Book Titles

1. Abstract No access
2. Table of Contents No access
1. Introduction No access
2. Charles Jennens, Handel’s Librettist No access
1. 3.1 The King James Version of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer: Traditional Sources of Messiah’s Text No access
2. 3.2 Messiah’s Title No access
3. 3.3 Messiah’s Epigraph No access
4. 3.4 The Sixteen Divergences from the King-James-Version Text No access
5. 3.5 The Ten Divergences from the Psalter Text in the The Book of Common Prayer No access
6. 3.6 The Twenty-six (resp. Twenty-seven) Variants Compared and Arranged Statistically No access
1. 4.1 The Priority of Reading Scripture in Anglican and Nonjuring churches No access
2. 4.2 Jennens’ Theological Library No access
3. 4.3 Codex Alexandrinus and Grabe’s Septuagint No access
4. 4.4 Mill’s Novum Testamentum Graecum No access
5. 4.5 The Peshitta No access
6. 4.6 Jennens’ Methodology: The “When” and the “Why” No access
7. 4.7 The Bentley Connection No access
5. Messiah: A Time Capsule of Early-Modern Textual Criticism No access
Bibliography No access